Gun violence is a tricky topic to broach with kids.

“Sparking Peace,” a new children’s book by Hannah Rose Martin, a Mennonite pastor at Beth-El Mennonite Church in Colorado Springs, and Teresa Kim Pecinovsky, an ordained minister and bestselling children’s book author in Minnesota, helps caregivers with those conversations.

“There’s such a need for appropriate developmental stages of literature about gun violence,” Pecinovsky said. “My kids are at an age where I think about how to introduce the topic to them in a safe way that isn’t terrifying.”

The 40-page book, available at Poor Richard’s Books & Gifts, as well as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers, was released in April.

The story follows a young child who creates a friendship with his elderly neighbor after accidentally breaking one of her windows with an errant soccer ball. The boy later sees her at a community event his dad takes him to, where a blacksmith forges an item into something new, while also inviting attendees to whack the item with a hammer during the creative process. The boy asks his dad about the item: “He thinks for a minute, watching the forge. ‘It is something sad. Something that breaks our hearts.’”

That item is a gun, though the text doesn’t identify it for various reasons.

The story is inspired by the Springs-based nonprofit RAWtools, which Martin’s husband founded in 2012 as a way to move communities from gun violence. The organization accepts and destroys all manner of firearms, such as hunting rifles, handguns and assault-style weapons, and uses blacksmithing to turn them into works of art and garden tools. The weapons are surrendered for a variety of reasons, such as parents who don’t feel comfortable having them around their children, or because the firearm was inherited and the new owner doesn’t want it, or because the owner lost someone to suicide by that firearm.

RAWtools holds Gun Buybacks/Safe Surrender events in the Springs and around the country throughout the year where people can come and participate in the destruction of the weapon.

“We have environments where children come and caregivers come to me and say how do I explain this tragedy,” said Martin, who’s also a reading interventionist.

“People are wanting to find a way to do this that won’t cause more fear or trauma and they don’t always have the right vocabulary or tools. Especially for parents, we’re afraid we’ll go too far or ruin something. We want to find ways that will be loving and an invitation to have harder conversations while in your own home and in a safe space.”

Martin and Pecinovsky, who also is the author of the bestselling children’s book “Mother God” and a family storybook Bible called “The Peace Table,” didn’t know each other before co-authoring the book.

Pecinovsky, who was familiar with RAWtools through events hosted by her former Mennonite church in Texas, responded to an open call from their publisher with the idea.

She contacted Martin’s husband and a partnership was founded between the two women, who each wrote half the book — Pecinovsky the first half, and Martin the second.

Together, they decided against naming the gun violence in the book, saying consent is needed with the topic.

“You don’t want to jump right into it because you don’t know if a child is pulling it off the shelf,” Martin said.

“It could just be a transformative story about friendship or it could be an opportunity for something deeper. You need to be literal with kids and direct, but through the book the best way to do it is not be direct, and by indirectness you offer the caregiver the choice of how deep or light they want to get into the conversation.”

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